Letter from Sándor Ferenczi to Sigmund Freud, June 23, 1913

Internationale Zeitschrift für Ärztliche Psychoanalyse

Budapest, June 23, 1913

Dear Professor,

My impression of the work on totem was deep—despite the fact that I was already acquainted with most (not all) of its trains of thought. The Oedipus complex really proves here to be the hypomochlion,1 supported on which one can unravel all the secrets of the soul. We (Jones and I) will come back to a detailed evaluation of individual passages after we have read it together once more, that will be tomorrow or the day after. I hasten, however, to ask you not to insert any qualification, but to leave everything the way it is in the proofs of the Totem. The presentation of your case is flawless; there is no room left for doubt.

I am thinking after all that that your subsequent vacillation is actually a displaced retrospective obedience2 with respect to the fathers (and your own father), who in this work are depriving you of the last remnants of your power over the soul of man. Your work is namely also a totem meal; you are the priest of Mithras,3 who singlehandedly kills the father—your students are the audience to this “holy” action.—You yourself compared the significance of the Totem paper with that of the Interpretation of Dreams.—But the latter was the “reaction to [your] father's death”!4 In the Interpretation of Dreams you carried out the struggle against your own father, in the work on Totem, against the ghostly, religious father imagoes.—Hence, the festive joy at the work's coming into being (at the sacrificial act), which was then followed by the subsequent scruples.

I am firmly convinced the work on Totem will one day become the nodal point of the study of the history of civilization.

I find new and outstanding the idea of transmission by means of unconscious understanding,5 which to a certain extent forces the phylogenetic theories into the background.

Jones is my best and dearest patient; he is competent, clever, obedient,